Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World

Thursday, April 10, 2014

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This is the first in an occasional series on “deep science,” an attempted antidote to the “absent-minded science” I’ve written about in many previous columns.

Science has defined the modern era in many ways and is truly the reigning knowledge paradigm in the modern era – even if it’s not always acknowledged as such. The key features of modernity, specialization and technology, were made possible primarily by the remarkable development of scientific techniques and knowledge over the last 400 years, since the time of Galileo and Kepler.

Tam Hunt

But while science has brought us the modern world, in a very real and direct way, it has also brought us to a point where man’s perennial search for meaning is imperiled. This is the case because today’s scientific worldview seems to deny the importance of many inquiries that humans have perennially found important, including questions about our place in the universe, the nature of consciousness, and questions about God, purpose, and many other deep topics. And where it doesn’t deny the importance of such questions the answers it provides are increasingly dissatisfying and, frankly, depressing.

Science is the basis for “scientific materialism,” the worldview shared by most scientists and philosophers. Scientific materialism holds, essentially, that the universe is nothing but matter and energy in motion. Humans evolved through random processes, as did all life. Human minds emerged at some point in our development as our nervous system became sufficiently complex to support the interior world of our minds that we all know intimately.

Much of this is surely correct, but there are a number of problems with this worldview. For example, scientific materialism is unable to explain coherently when and why mind/subjectivity emerged. How far down the evolutionary ladder does mind extend? When did mind first appear in the universe? We shouldn’t expect science to be able to provide firm and specific answers to these questions because such answers are probably impossible to produce. But we should expect the intellectual architecture of our modern world to provide at least an outline of coherent answers to such questions. Thomas Nagel’s recent bookMind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False makes a very similar point.

I’ve argued argued in past columns that today’s science is an “absent-minded science” because of this failure to adequately explain the role of mind in nature. The prevailing theory of emergence argues that mind simply appears with the development of sufficient biological complexity but no one today can provide a good answer as to when and why mind emerged when it did. These major questions remain unanswered within the materialist paradigm and its philosophy of “emergentism.” This inability to explain the most primary feature of reality for each of us — our own minds — undermines the intellectual edifice of modernity.

Perhaps even more importantly, scientific materialism cannot be the basis for much in our search for higher meaning in our lives. As human beings, we have an innate need for a life-affirming mythos. By mythos I don’t mean fantasy; rather, I mean we need a subtextual narrative that supports our sense of self and our place in the world. The more accurate this narrative is, in terms of its congruence with events in the external world, the better it works. Scientific materialism falls short in providing such a mythos.

The key challenge of our time is to reconcile the truths and methods of modern science with this need for personal meaning, for personal legends – as Paulo Coelho puts it in his wonderful book about the meaning of it all The Alchemist. The new alchemy will turn the lead of scientific materialism into the gold of a new deep science.

Scientific materialism’s mythos was summed up well by the Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” If this is the case, why don’t we all just commit suicide? Well, we don’t because each of us has a personal mythos that justifies the space we occupy and the air we breathe.

We are, it seems, in need of a more life-affirming worldview than today’s scientific materialism can provide. This new series of essays will flesh out my thoughts on 1) how science can and should change to become more scientific, but also 2) how a new type of science can act as the foundation for a new mythos to better sustain our lives.

This is what I mean by “deep science.” A new deep science will be more scientific than today’s surface-oriented endeavor because it recognizes the internal aspects behind the world of surfaces. Deep science is also more holistic than today’s overly narrow science because it can help us more comprehensively describe the universe and its amazing contents, and allow us to create coherent and useful theories about these contents.

Ken Wilber coined the phrase “deep science” in his insightful book The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion. Wilber’s suggestions in this area are a great basis for additional inquiry. I will use Wilber’s framework as the basis for my own discussion in these essays, but will expand and amend a little here and there.

The key point of Wilber’s deep science is that all scientific and spiritual inquiries — which are united methodologically in his deep science, at least in an overarching manner — consist of three strands: 1) an injunctive method, which is a set of how-to instructions specific to the field at issue; 2) data gathering, in terms of direct experience, through use of the injunctive method at issue; 3) community confirmation or negation of the data gathered. Wilber states in Marriage:

The three strands of deep science separate the valid from the bogus … helping us to separate not only true propositions from false propositions, but also authentic self-expression from lying, beauty from degradation, and moral aspirations from deceit and deception.

Part II of this series will explore some applications of the three strands of deep science and will also flesh out how Wilber’s approach might be a useful and fair reconciliation of scientific and religious ways of viewing the world.

If we are to find a way out of the existential trap of scientific materialism, we need not reject science; rather, we should look deeper into scientific method and reexamine its foundations.

Comments

Ronald Dworkin's new book from Harvard U.Press, RELIGIOUS ATHEISM, tackles some of your points, Tam. And I agree that many have fallen into "the existential trap of scientific materialism" -- and most of 'em are depressed and aren't aware of it. What about the intense need for negative films, however excellent, but beginning with dystopian premises?

Tam, although you might find the answers provided by what I suppose you would call "non-deep" science to be "increasingly dissatisfying and, frankly, depressing," many others in an increasingly secular and even atheistic age apparently do not. So perhaps the need isn't for "deeper" science but for deeper understanding that (to paraphrase Karl Krauss on psychoanalysis) the search for "meaningful meaning" is the disease for which it purports to be the cure.

Hi DrDan, do you mean Religion Without God by Dworkin? If so, I'll check it out. I think you may be right about the cultural symptoms of our current existential malady. There does seem to be a strange fascination with the dark side of human nature. But there are probably a ton of other reasons behind this current trend too.

pk, there is a certain satisfaction and grim "joy" in accepting the hard-nosed meaningless world of scientific materialism. I know because I was one of those people for quite some time. I found it uplifting in terms of ego gratification to be above those who had weaker bellies and needed the meaning provided by patriarchal God or gods. But over time I realized that the scientific materialists had overshot the mark and had become fetishistic in their embrace of meaningless to the point of nihilism. And when we examine the best evidence from physics, biology and the neurosciences I also realized that scientific materialism is missing half the story. So we get a twofer with deep science: 1) we get to re-include the missing half of the story (our own minds and subjectivity more generally) in a far more complete scientific description of the universe; 2) we get a far grander narrative about the universe and our role in it. I'll be fleshing out these two themes in later essays.

Tam, when Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg said “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless” he was talking about the physical universe seeming pointless. He was not making a claim about his or anyone else’s life being purposeless.

People, along with other thinking, living things are natural born purpose generators. That the universe itself seems to have no purpose is irrelevant to understanding purpose. Understanding how purpose emerges out of non-purpose is the first step in a mature understanding of human purpose and flourishing.

Is the idea that it is somehow logically impossible for purpose to emerge out of no-purpose what is driving Nagel’s foray (and perhaps yours?) into seeming mysticism? That sounds like the creationist ‘argument’ that life cannot immerge out of non-life. Both have no rational basis so far as I know.

At the time of the big bang, there was no life, and I would argue, no purpose to the universe. Now, there is both life and purpose (in living things) in the universe. Launching off into Nagel’s new mysticism to explain how purpose arose is no more intellectually productive than saying “God did it!”

Markus, yes, the problem is how purposiveness arose in a universe that is alleged to be entirely non-purposive. As this problem is usually framed, including in my article above, the question is how does mind itself emerge from non-mind? Mind surely includes purpose in any reasonable definition. I link to my previous essays in the essay above, in which I address in detail the problems of emergence of mind from no-mind. Emergence of life from non-life is a different problem. How do you think purpose evolved from that which has no purpose? And how do you define purpose?

DrDan, your statement that there was no life at the BB is a claim. People like Nagel might claim that life (and mind) were there all along, intrinsic properties of the universe. Given that there is no scientific explanation for the origin of life and mind, I don't find one claim to be any more supportable than the other. Emergent life and mind are magical claims, to me. Panpsychism has its own problems, such as combination. No matter what direction I look, I see problems.

Torbill, the combination problem is often cited as a problem with panpsychism but there are numerous responses to this problem, including my own detailed account here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content....

Also, see Tononi's many papers on his Integrated Information Theory that presents another solution to the combination problem.